Quiz for bright guests on a late night TV show: “What comes to mind when you think of Oscar Wilde?” (A) Famous and wealthy Irish writer. (B) Author of witty plays and epigrams. (C) Dandy, darling of London society. (D) Famous Victorian writer to be condemned to two years hard labor for gross indecency. (E) Destitute and deserted by his lover, dead in Paris at 46.Philadelphia playwright Michael Whistler’s latest play, MICKLE STREET shows a different Wilde: 27, searching for an identity, and seeking out advice from the famous Walt Whitman. We see Wilde’s wit evolve, but many of his words taste like young wine—a fledgling writer struggling with his identity, convinced that he already has made it because of the many Americans who are attending his lectures, from New York and Philadelphia, all the way to Colorado—even though the press writes less than flattering reviews.

Being associated with famous people was as muchen vogue in the late 1800s as it is today. David M. Friedman, author of Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity, provides evidence that”Wilde didn’t travel to Camden to learn how to be a famous writer. [. . .] He went to learn how to be a famous person.”Whistler features the encounter of the rising, if fairly inexperienced, Wilde (played with indefatigable exuberance by Daniel Fredrick) with the seasoned and much discussed Whitman, then 62, at his house on Mickle Street in Camden, NJ, on January 31, 1882 (played by Buck Schirner with the frazzled maturity and knowledge of age).Right from the beginning, we see Wilde reflected through the eyes of Gilbert and Sullivan, the famous Victorian writers of comic operas that satirized the aesthetic movement of the 1870s and ’80s and all that went with it: fads, vanity, and pretentiousness.Mary, the Irish-Catholic widow who looks after Whitman (played by Sabrina Profitt with the conviction and charm of a housekeeper who has seen more than is good for her moral standards), opens the play. Before his arrival, full of impatience, she sings a song from the popular opera Patience, caricaturing Wilde:“Conceive me if you can/A Bombty-bomp young man/So ultra poetical/so etty-quette-tetical/Out of the way young man.”

Shortly thereafter, the tall and handsome Wilde arrives at Whitman’s humble and overcrowded home, all done up with his famous fur coat and pantaloons, looking like a Victorian male Madonna at a gala. However, Mary doesn’t believe in externals: “The crowd seemed more impressed with his appearance than his speech.”Whistler’s Mary has a fine eye for different layers of reality: “You know the paper says he lives ‘on Beauty alone.’ All he asks for lunch is a glass of water for the posy he carries about.” Even when Whitman tries to explain to her the “L’art pour l’art” or “art for art’s sake” concept and Wilde’s Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood aestheticism, she doesn’t buy it: “Suppose I were to make a pie for you, Mr. Whitman, and instead of cutting you a slice told you that ‘Oh no—this pie is not for the eating. It is ‘complete in itself.’ I made it for the purpose of being a beautiful, aesthetic pie.’” No wonder the audience chuckled many times, especially in the first part of the play.MICKLE STREET doesn’t fall into the trap of lionizing Wilde or Whitman. Mary makes it quite clear that “for all your fine words and flowers I know you for what you are, Mr. Walt Whitman: a trouble to man and woman both.” Whitman, unafraid of her, also has a few choice terms of endearment for her, “Mary, don’t be a stubborn old goat,” or, “She’s a skittish trout when she’s of a mind.” While she may not always understand the man whom she observes from her prim and proper perspective, she nevertheless serves as a balancing force throughout the play.Audiences in Britain and the US at the time laughed at Wilde, the talented but attention-craving poet—the way many Americans today make fun of the not so witty Paris Hilton and the Kardashians. Unfazed, Wilde loves playing the role of the enfant terrible— dressed to the hilt, posy in his lapel. In Whistler’s adaptation, Wilde even encourages the attention: “I want to shock.”Whistler imagines a conversation between two writers: Whitman, with all his foibles, clearly has the upper hand, while Wilde’s verbal dancing doesn’t get him anywhere, except the awareness that, perhaps, there is more to life than theatrics and striking up “battles in this revolution for the Science of Beauty.”Wilde, the dandy, throws out more than lava of aesthetic pronouncements. There are moments when he touches on the untouchable: “We do not wear our sins as we wear our cloaks. Those we keep in a closet.” Whistler’s MICKLE STREET presents some intense moments between those two men who were considered to be fluid in their sexuality, and were punished for their writing and their lifestyle—Whitman, by being denied a paid position at a hospital during the Civil War, and Wilde being sent to jail.Friedman implies that both Whitman and Wilde were publicity hounds—with Whitman even writing enthusiastic, albeit anonymous, reviews about his controversial masterpiece, Leaves of Grass. These two writers were quite a match in their desire to reach as wide an audience as possible. “Cultivating newspaper coverage and meetings with American literary giants, the tour made Wilde the second best-known Brit in the country after Queen Victoria, despite having published almost nothing,” as Kevin C. Shelly points out.Whitman, overwhelmed by Wilde’s many statements, mixed in with his compliments, blurts out, “You have thrown more ideas at me in an hour than fifteen other men I might know. You are smart, and you see something. But you have to stop staring all mooney eyed at ancient ruins. You no more live in an ancient temple than I do. You want to live in the world—live in the world.”

Oscar Wilde was one of the wittiest gay playwrights, poets and writers of epigrams in the English-speaking world, and the author of the groundbreaking novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Wilde, the darling of British society, was sentenced to two years hard labor at Reading Gaol for “gross indecency” — even though there was no evidenceother than some love letters of his to Bosie, the young Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas, son of the homophobic John Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry. Eventually, Wilde was allowed pen and paper in prison, where he composed one of the most moving letters ever written by a man to his young lover — “De Profundis (From the Depths).”To this day, people are traveling to the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris to pay their respects to Wilde who, penniless and unknown, only 46, died of cerebral meningitis, in Room 16 at Hôtel d’Alsace — deserted by his lover, who did not want to be disinherited by his wealthy, albeit ruthless, father.Not everyone, though, knows about the 27-year-old Wilde, who — wealthy, intelligent and with a tremendous desire to make a big name for himself — went on a tour through the United States, giving well-attended lectures on art and literature, determined to meet as many famous American writers, including Walt Whitman, so that he could not only bask in their glory, but also learn from them.David M. Friedman, author of “Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity,” provides evidence that “Wilde didn’t travel to Camden to learn how to be a famous writer … He went to learn how to be a famous person.”America’s oldest theater with the world’s largest subscriber base, the Walnut Street Theatre just premiered “Mickle Street” by Philadelphia playwright Michael Whistler, which features the encounter between the rising, if young, Wilde (Daniel Fredrick) from Britain and America’s seasoned and much-discussed Walt Whitman (Buck Schirner), then 62, at his house on Mickle Street in Camden, N.J., on Jan. 31, 1882.Right from the beginning of the play, we see Wilde reflected through the eyes of Gilbert and Sullivan, the famous Victorian writers of operettas that had become big-box office successes both in the United States and Britain. Mary (Sabrina Profitt), the widow who looks after Whitman, sings this musical caricature of Wilde, the upper-class dandy from the popular Gilbert and Sullivan operetta “Patience:” “Conceive me if you can/A Bombty-bomp young man/So ultra poetical/so etty-quette-tetical/Out of the way young man.”Shortly thereafter, the tall and handsome Wilde arrives at Whitman’s humble and overcrowded home, dressed to the hilt with his famous fur coat and pantaloons, looking like a Victorian male Madonna at a gala.Unlike the American singer, Wilde plays the poetic wild card: “I come as a poet to call upon a poet,” he proclaims at his arrival — to the delight of audiences who experience a battle royale between the poor and aging American star among poets: the wild young Wilde, who made up his lack of experience with panache, and Mary, the simple Irish-American soul with great convictions that clash with both men and their lifestyles, at least the way she sees them.She warns Wilde about Whitman’s predilection for working-class young men, including the famous Pete Doyle, a streetcar conductor whom she calls “the trolley man,” one of Whitman’s favorite companions:“He rides the trolley all day to be near him and talk — day finishes they come here and drink. Pete doesn’t leave — there’s not a liberty Pete doesn’t take about this house. There is not a liberty that Mr. Whitman doesn’t take with Pete.”Showing Wilde more photos of Whitman’s favorite young men, she exclaims, full of consternation:“Sailors, peddlers, soldiers — ah! An 18-year-old boy he gave a ring to. I thought to put [these images] aside as company was coming. It appears I needn’t have bothered. T’isn’t natural. It’s an inversion. But the man is what he is, and my hiding a few photographs won’t change that. He’ll tell you it is all a part of his ‘cosmology,’ that it is a part of a ‘new country of comrades.’”Seconds later, reflecting on Wilde’s effusive behavior toward Whitman, the old widow issues a warning: “So you be sure you know where you might end up when you start into flattering and flirting and all this ‘cosmology.’ When he’s got his rand up I can smell it on him like a perfume. With all your talk of jardinières and amarylli, yer a fancy boy yourself.”When Whitman returns from the kitchen with a “working man’s treat — Milk punch!” (whiskey and milk), Mary stiffens her back and leaves the room, with Whitman buddying up to the young Wilde: “Well. We’ll continue, just us boys then. We two boys together clinging, one the other never leaving, up and down the roads going.”Wilde plays along and brings up the controversial “Leaves of Grass” collection that he had read in London, quoting Whitman’s references to “manly attachment,” “adhesive love,” “love of comrades” and “the life that does not exhibit itself.” Some moving discussions ensue, including one nasty review that describes the content of the poetry collection as “a sin so vile that it is not spoken by Christians.” Little did Wilde know that he would be accused of a similar crime, end up in prison and, shortly thereafter, die way before his time.Whistler’s new play, based on historical facts and imagined conversations between two famous writers (directed by Greg Wood), opens new doors, shows an insecure young Wilde who seems to hide behind “aesthetics and art” while Whitman teaches Wilde more than he might have bargained for, advising him, “Go see America. Go see the world. Find out what creature you are. And for all the frippery — be honest. With us, and with yourself.”